The thing most people don’t know about billing issues is that they rarely have anything to do with billing. Of course, customers review, analyze and evaluate their bills. They will complain when they find something wrong. But once the company is providing reasonably “good bills” to its customers where one plus one equals two, customer complaints will have little to do with the billing process.

The basic tenet of billing is that “the bill is the ocean,” which means everything a company does flows into and eventually appears on the customer’s bill. Therefore, the customer’s billing complaints will reveal problems upstream in areas such as advertising, marketing, sales process, service offering, operations, etc. In this way, customer billing issues should be viewed as an internal diagnostic tool. Billing issues provide timely, useful information from current customers who provide detailed information and are passionate enough about the issue to inform the company of the issue and demand resolution. Resolving them will have real impact on the business and can be measured simply by tracking the reduction in billing issues.
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